


An Unusual Vintage

by Omorka



Category: Eureka, Real Genius (1985)
Genre: Alcohol, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-20
Updated: 2010-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 07:35:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/134672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omorka/pseuds/Omorka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Normally Chris wouldn't end up at a wine bar, but you meet the most interesting people at this one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Unusual Vintage

In retrospect, he should have realized it wasn’t exactly a standard fern bar as soon as he saw the wine selection. Oh, there were the usual overpriced bottles directly from obscure corners of Europe, and the dull California whites and rosés. But there were distinctly too many selections from small, interesting, local vineyards. Yuppie-hive bars never had more than one or two of those, and often none at all.

It was too bad, Chris Knight mused, that he wasn’t really much of a wine drinker. He eased onto a stool and flagged the bartender, an older woman with laugh lines and frown-wrinkles in equal measure; he winked at her and was rewarded with a hint of a smile. All the waitresses were bleached-blonde and California slender - probably beach bunnies and would-be models; this woman must be one of the owners, or at least the shift manager. Pointing at the menu, he asked “Can I get a Rolling Rock and a glass?”

She shrugged, as if it were a common request. “Sure, no problem.” The man on his left gave him something closer to the reaction he was looking for, a short, irritated glare.

As she shuffled towards the too-shiny refrigerator, he reached into his inside pocket and tugged out something that might have been the bastard stepchild of a Thermos and a hip flask. She scowled as she set the glass in front of him, but said nothing.

He flashed her a toothy grin. “It’s not liquor, don’t worry. I’m not looking to get anyone in trouble but me.” The cap spun off in his hand, releasing a few wisps of silvery vapor.

Now the bartender was genuinely curious. “You’re from the lab up the street,” she said, not quite making it a question.

“I’m a consultant,” he corrected her. He tipped the insulated flask up, and four or five tiny spheres spilled into the glass and smoked gently. Normally, he’d have picked one of the waitresses to flirt with, but for some reason, she seemed more fun tonight. “You might want to stand back a bit,” he warned, still grinning.

She did, as did the yuppie couple to his right and the waitress who was now lurking behind him. He raised the green glass bottle and started pouring, very slowly.

For a moment, nothing untoward seemed to happen. Then the head began to froth up, far faster than his pouring speed should have produced it. By the time he’d decanted half the bottle, the glass was threatening to fountain all over this section of the bar.

Good enough. He picked it up and chugged it.

The bartender, to her credit, only did a double-take. The yuppies shrieked and backpedaled, sure he’d start spewing beer foam at them; the waitress yelped and melted into the dimness of the rest of the bar. He slammed the glass down theatrically and tipped another couple of spheres into it.

A low voice at his left elbow murmured, “Neat trick. How’d you get dry ice to sublimate that fast in the glass, without popping the top on your flask or evaporating as soon as you uncorked it?”

Chris turned to look at his interlocutor. Older, maybe in his forties, in a suit far too nice to be a run-of-the-mill bar rat; neatly trimmed dark beard, piercing green eyes. “Technically, it’s not dry ice,” he started, then interrupted himself with a monstrous belch.

The older guy leaned over the glass, sniffed, and nodded. “Nitrogen. I can smell it now, or, more to the point, can’t smell it.”

Chris was impressed despite himself. “That’s right. We’re working on a lattice-packing technique for creating crystalline nitrogen compounds at barely-sub-zero temperatures.” He let the rest of the beer trickle down the side of the glass, frothing as the spheres dissolved in the amber liquid.

The guy in the suit watched them intently. “For superconductors?”

“No, although if we can solve the volatility issues there might be some future applications in that direction.” Chris paused. “What lab do you work for?”

“Not one you’ve ever heard of.” The other guy - no, the other scientist; there was something about the way he observed that made it obvious - swirled a dark red wine in his own glass and took a single sip. For a moment he was lost in thought; then he was calculating probabilities. He reached a decision, and immediately caught Chris’s eyes again. “I’m Dr. Nathan Stark, and I used to be -”

Chris swallowed; he’d gone for a glance at the shoes. “Solid?” he asked cautiously.

Stark glanced down; one foot trailed through the wooden floor. “Damn,” he sighed.

\---

The back room wasn’t private, exactly, but no one else had wandered in there, past potted palms easily as tall as either of them and a curtain of pothos ivy. Chris stared at him, each part in turn. “How are you holding the glass?”

“I’m not completely sure,” Stark admitted. “If I stop paying attention to it, it - slips through. But if I give it even partial focus, it’s fine.”

Knight tapped at the hand-tooled leather loafers with the eraser end of a well-gnawed pencil. “Same with these?”

“Most of the time.” Stark grimaced as the eraser drifted through his left heel. “For some reason, the feet tend to go first.”

“Not a phase-state problem,” Chris mused, sticking the pencil back in his mouth and digging through his jacket pockets. “You’re not turning gaseous, you’re just - not solid, either.” He flipped open a mini-notebook, then stooped to pick up the stick of gum that had fallen out of it. “Any idea what happened?”

“A researcher at the lab that used to be mine decoupled the vibratory rate of a photon from the space-time continuum.” Stark watched Knight’s eyes closely. “The device he used failed to re-synch it automatically, so I had to do it manually. From inside the machine.”

Chris’s pencil danced across the page. “So it popped back into synch, and you popped out?”

Stark seemed gratified that he hadn’t had to explain that. “More or less. My individual particles seemed to become delocalized in the timestream. The two witnesses observed what appeared to them to be my disintegration.” His face clouded. “I didn’t intend for them to have to watch that; I’d assumed I’d just disappear with a bang.”

“So they haven’t tried to re-integrate you because they just think you’re dead?” Chris asked. He snuck a glance at Stark’s other hand, pressed against the table; it seemed pretty coherent, unlike his shoes.

Stark shook his head once, sharply. “Fargo - my former executive assistant - tried anyway. But I wasn’t there for him to re-synchronize.” He paused, mouth half-open as if he were about to say something else, then thought better of it.

“You weren’t not _there_ ,” Chris stated, sketching in a ratio at the very edge of the page. “You weren’t _then_.” He dropped into a chair and looked up, his hair flopping into his eyes. “I can’t say for sure when you’re from, but your shoes are from 2007.”

Stark scowled at the wineglass. “I thought this tasted a little green for a ’96 vintage.” He paused, waiting for Chris to fill the silence. For once, he didn’t. Finally, he cleared his throat. “So - what year is it?”

“1999, although it doesn’t look like the party’s over yet. No,” he caught Stark, raising one hand flat before he could interrupt, “don’t tell me - while I don’t think we can cause a paradox here, let’s not risk unravelling the fabric of space-time, okay?”

“Any more than I already have?” Stark smirked at him, one eyebrow arched heavenward.

“I know a great knitter,” Chris answered with a half-smile of his own, “but I think even she would have trouble with that. Tell you what - I think your problem is a little out of my league, but I know a couple of guys that do things with theoretical math that are kinky even by my standards. Let me introduce you to Lazlo and Mitch, and see if either of them have some ideas - Mitch knows more about photons than I’ve ever forgotten.”

Stark perched one hip on the table and levered his feet back out of the floor again. “They won’t call the military as soon as they realize?”

“Nah,” Chris assured him. “We’re not particularly military-friendly around here. Anyway, Mitch has seen weirder things, and from Lazlo’s perspective, I think he’ll find you perfectly co-phasetic.”

Stark blinked. “Great. Of all the physicists I could fall in with, I get one that puns.”

“Hey,” Chris chided, “just be glad I came in here at all. I mean, you saw I’m a beer kind of guy. I wouldn’t normally hang out with a drifting wine-er.”

“Just get me to a lab,” Stark groaned, and followed him out.


End file.
